U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta on Wednesday dismissed antitrust lawsuits filed by Chegg and Penske Media Corporation against Alphabet's Google, ruling that the publishers failed to meet the legal standards required to prove the company's AI-powered search features violated antitrust law.
Chegg and Penske Media, parent company of Rolling Stone, alleged that Google's AI Overviews diverted search traffic from their sites and coerced them into providing content without compensation by threatening to reduce their search visibility.
Mehta wrote that the plaintiffs could not distinguish between an expectation of traffic and a formal agreement. "An expectation is not an agreement," the judge said. "It is simply how a general search engine works."
The ruling follows Mehta's landmark 2024 antitrust decision against Google, though he acknowledged being "not unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in." He stressed that antitrust law cannot substitute for legislative action to address the economic fallout from technological change.
The lawsuits reflected a broader industry concern: traffic to news outlets and smaller websites has declined significantly since Google introduced AI Overviews. The dismissal closes one avenue for publishers to compel compensation through existing legal frameworks.
Google has begun paying roughly 100 publishers for content contributions to its AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini products, establishing a voluntary licensing model outside antitrust enforcement. The ruling suggests publishers seeking compensation will need to negotiate direct licensing agreements or pursue legislative solutions rather than rely on antitrust claims to extract payments for search traffic.
